ROCKRGRL NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1997

(This version is slightly different than the one that ran in the print
mag.)




CALIFORNIA TUFFY: 
CARLA BOZULICH OF THE GERALDINE FIBBERS

By Silja J.A. Talvi










	Since ROCKRGRL last caught up with singer/songwriter Carla
Bozulich nearly two years ago, The Geraldine Fibbers have been very busy.
After their triumphant debut album, Lost Somewhere Between The Earth
And My Home, The Fibbers released a scorching live album from a
sold-out concert in San Francisco in 1996, Live From The Bottom of The
Hill (Virgin). That album was followed by the 1997 release of the
satirically-titled What part of Get Thee Gone don't you understand?
(Sympathy For The Record Industry). With liner notes written by fellow San
Pedro native, radical bass-meister Mike Watt, the album is a tempestuous
collection of revamped country covers, varied arrangements of songs from
the debut album, and earlier collaborations including "Blue Cross," with
Beck.
	With fans and critics waiting to see if they could recapture the
demented, darkly passionate sound of their debut album, The Geraldine
Fibbers released Butch, their second full-length studio recording
on Virgin earlier this year. So much for the concern that The Fibbers
might be a one-album-wonder-band. 
	From the first explosive track, "California Tuffy," to the
closing, haunting lullaby of "Heliotrope," Butch knocks you
off your chair and sends you sailing through the richly emotional and
musical terrain that The Fibbers have charted as their own. With Carla at
the mast of this enigmatic ship, the listener is taken on a furious voyage
through an unsettling landscape. When you've finally docked at the shore,
you're shivering and perhaps even a bit frightened, but there's a
steadiness in your step that wasn't there before. Butch is some kind of
magical shake-up for the soul.
	On a nationwide tour to promote Butch, The Geraldine Fibbers now
consist of a somewhat altered line-up of remarkably gifted musicians: Nels
Cline, guitar (replacing Daniel Keenan); William Tutton, upright bass;
Kevin Fitzgerald, drums; and Leyna Papach, violin (replacing Jessy
Greene). Although every member of the band plays other instruments on the
album, Carla's taken on a decidedly eclectic range. Usually accompanying
herself with the electric guitar, Carla's also thrown in a bit of electric
bass, glockenspiel, organwife, piano strings, and a sample-loaded Ensoniq
16+ for good measure. 
	ROCKRGRL had the opportunity to sit down with Carla for a lengthy
interview at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, where The Fibbers
performed later that evening to another filled-to-capacity crowd. Tired
from the band's long drive from Oregon to California, Carla was initially
most concerned about being harassed about her own personal background. It
seems that many of her interviewers have focused on asking Carla personal
questions about her troubled past, and she's having no more of it. With
reassurances of a genuine interview and issues of journalistic integrity
out of the way, the discussion takes on a warmly humorous and lively tone. 



RG: One of the things that immediately stands out at one of your shows is
that fact that your audiences seem to be comprised of a wide cross-section
of people. In San Francisco, for example, the crowd tends to be an unusual
blend of gay and lesbian couples, old punks, 'riotgrrl' types, and
intellectuals. I'm wondering if you're aware of that diversity in your
listeners, and what kind of an impact that has on you?

CB: I'm very pleased about that. It was a constant source of frustration
for me in my old band that it wasn't more like that. Because here, the
reality is that ... we're touring in a band, playing in a different city
every night. To not have a diverse audience kind of means to be bored.
It's just much more interesting. I feel pretty lucky. I think that our
audience in general is an intelligent audience and a creative audience and
also just a group of people that give a shit ... I would say that it would
be fairly easy to make a massive categorizational generalization between
people that give a shit and people that don't, and what types of music and
art they go in for.

RG: How do you feel in particular about the many women who seem to feel
that you give a voice to their own inner torment or struggle and perhaps
their own histories of abuse or neglect? Are you again cognizant of that?
Is that too weighty a responsibility for you?

CB: I would say that's too weighty a responsibility for me ... The thing
about it is that people have often asked me "What's it like to be a strong
woman in a weak world?" The thing is, for me, that sometimes I regret
giving such a serious consideration to some of these issues in such a
public light because people misunderstand me constantly. Although I'm
proud to say that I stand up against abuse against women, and I stand up
for the underdog anytime, almost. And the AIDS issues are very important
to me, and civil rights and human rights in general are a huge priority
for me. But the fact that I think that sometimes the general impression,
the overwhelming message that people get from me is very heavy, almost a
weighty message. That kind of makes me sad.

RG: Really?

CB: Yes, I wish that I could offer something that was a little bit ...
it's so funny, I'm about to say lighter ... And right as I'm saying that
I'm remembering this movie that was about that. There was this old movie
that I've watched before and I never made the connection before. But there
was this movie about a man that wrote screenplays or something, and was a
... oh, I remember, he was a funny writer! 

RG: A comic writer, yes.

CB: And he made people laugh, and it was light and people loved him and he
was huge and was well-loved, and he wanted to write something meaningful
and serious. But it didn't work out. I'm just flashing on it.

RG: That totally makes sense.

CB: I think that the way I sing, I sing so hard and I sing with so much
fury and emotion and passion and everything, I think sometimes that it's a
little bit much, you know? But I guess that's really the way I do it. I
can temper it to some extent, but that's just me. I could stop singing.

RG: I was going to touch on something to do with that later on, and I'll
just skip to it. Because when I was researching for this interview, I
flashed back on a documentary that I saw several years ago. And it was a
documentary on indigenous Balinese spiritual beliefs. 

CB: Wow.

RG: In that culture, it's encouraged, in fact it's almost necessary to
embrace both the dark and the light aspects of their personalities. So
they have to embrace both good and evil to be seen as normal functioning
people in that society. And the dark characteristics tend to be expressed
through the arts--through singing, dancing, painting, and so on. And you
struck me right away as being someone who's probably already recognized
the value of embracing both in your life. It's pretty apparent that your
performance is that in great part--that embracing of the dark side to you
and that it's essential to your own well-being.

CB: Well, to me the thing is that what you're seeing on stage really is
this battle. You might think that what you just said is what you're seeing
but really it's that ... I'm in a state of constant conflict between that
and this thing that wants to ... Like this sort of existential joker that
lives inside me. And those two are just battling constantly. And that's
what's on stage. It's almost like a dual personality thing. There's
definitely that clashing thing going on inside of me all the time. So I
think that I'm the happiest when the existentialist joker person starts to
get the upper hand. Because the other one, it can't be completely stifled.
But for me to really feel the weight of all that stuff that I'm saying,
it's impossible. I couldn't go around feeling the weight of all that all
the time. I do feel it a lot, and it's really tough. On stage, it's
definitely there. I feel that what I'm trying to say, I don't really know
what it is exactly, but I know that it's not simply "wake up, everything's
fucked up all around you!" It's also about ... there's like this corkscrew
that you can screw in there that will just set everything off kilter in
the funniest way. And I don't know, something like that.

RG: There are two songs in particular that I wanted to talk about ... and
one of them is "Toybox," the second song on Butch. I find it to be
a remarkably powerful song, with pretty clear overtones of incest. And
although the lyrics are packed with references to the loss of a girl's
innocence and instances of abuse, the girl doesn't appear as a complete
victim. She comes across as a figure who is dealing with a complexity of
issues and she's got this emerging personality that's a little twisted,
but she's emerging a survivor. And that's, I think, the power of the song
... Can you speak to the meaning of the song for you, or your own
motivations for writing a song like that?

CB: I think what you said is pretty interesting ... I think that what
you're talking about and how that connects to the song is the fact that
when people, whatever we experience, it changes us. And maybe in a way,
that girl in that song. OK, like you know those cartoons where there will
be the one superhero will be fighting the other one, and the one superhero
has like some weird like eyeball laser beam, and the other will have a
super-mirror twelve dimensional mirror reflector. And one of them will
inflict their weapon on the other one, but then the other one will have
some secret way, some secret super way of taking the other one's weapon
and turning it into more of their ... like, energy? 

RG: Sure, sure! Go on.

CB: And then turn it on their oppressor. And then what do you call it when
you're fighting someone? What do you call them ...

RG: An opponent?

CB: They can take their opponent's weapon and then turn it back around so
that they're using it ...

RG: Against them.

CB: Yeah. That's what that song is about.

RG: Did you just think of that? Or have you been formulating that for
awhile?

CB: I just thought of what I just said but that's like what you were
saying ... that's what it's about. There's other things, you can come at
it from another angle ... You could quietly destroy yourself and not even
know you were doing it ...  I mean, I know a guy who, when he was an
infant, his mother stabbed him in the chest, like a few times. She was
mentally ill, and he survived. And he is not troubled by it. He's forgiven
her, he accepts it, he's totally one of the happiest, most amazing people
I know ... He's like got a handle on the whole thing. And he didn't go to
years and years of therapy. He adjusted very well.

RG: That's really unusual.

CB: Yeah. There's that category somewhere out there, and they're a small
slice of life ... And there [are] the people who take that energy and turn
it back out the other way. That's what I try to do. I try to do a
combination of the two. For me, I like to battle the idea of destroying
myself. For me, that's the adventure of life. Because I think I have the
type of nature that. For me, it's a challenge. I enjoy a challenge. I'm a
fighter, and for me that's the big fight. There's no bigger thing for me
to conquer, so I spend a lot of time with that.